Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Symmetric, bitch

Today I rewrote my programs entirely from scratch... again. Except this time there was a useful point. Consider the shapes I was working with. A sphere, torus, parabloid... those are all round, aren't they? You can spin them all you want around the z-axis and it won't change how they look. Any surface like this is called rotationally symmetric and mathematically that means its curvature is dependent on only one variable instead of two.

So now my algorithms calculate the exact same stuff they did before, except they do it in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take, and the error shrinks much faster as well. So woot!

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